Why relicense Fedora documentation and wiki content

It is once again my happy duty to help shepherd Fedora content to a better licensing position (as I did three years ago.) We previously moved Fedora documentation from the GNU FDL to the OPL, moving the wiki content to the OPL at the same time. This current relicensing is very important for the Fedora Project overall, and is worth the risks involved. Hopefully, this article provides sufficient justification and risk assessment.

There are a small number of email threads you can catch up on, all of which are findable through this canonical thread on fedora-advisory-board. I am writing this blog post as a canonical location for my arguments and reasoning, then I can refer to it endlessly. (You know, canonically.) It may form the basis for a wiki page that represents a more formal Fedora stance, but for now, these are just my opinions, YMMV, IANAL, TINLA.

Why? Because it is vital that Fedora get off a content island and join the rest of the world. Because the problem of gaining permission from every person who ever edited the Fedora wiki is a huge task, and it’s not necessary. This is why the current CLA has this clause, which should be understood by everyone who agreed to the CLA, but I expect people have different levels of understanding about how the Fedora CLA works.

I’ve been referring to this clause as the nuclear option, an expression that means, “The one option you keep available in case you ever need it while praying that you never ever ever need it.” A bit dramatic, yes, but I think it reflects the feelings people have around the issue. Folks just plain don’t like it when you go and relicense their work. At least we should explain why.

We are relicensing from the OPL (Open Publications License) 1.0. The author and once-and-only-ever maintainer of the OPL wrote two years ago why people should stop using his license in favor of the CC licenses. Please read that, it is well reasoned and makes compelling arguments, even more so because it is from the OPL’s author. He wrote that two years ago, but quotes himself from 2003 when he recommended using a Creative Commons license instead. ‘Nuff said.

Fedora’s legal advisors, specifically Richard Fontana, highly recommend a switch from the OPL to the CC BY SA.

We are on an island nearly alone with the OPL. One of our main fellow inhabitants is Red Hat, who relicensed their content under the OPL without options so it could be used by the Fedora Project (and developed here, in advance of the next version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.) Since Red Hat is willing to change, we can move from a tiny archipelago to the largest continent of open content under the flag of the CC BY SA.

Ironically, one reason Fedora switched from the GNU FDL to the OPL was the idea of being downstream of content from Red Hat’s professional writing team.

Other organizations that have content we can reuse in Fedora and contribute back to, such as Wikipedia and GNOME, have switched or are switching to the CC BY SA. Why does this matter? For one easy example, we can write a definitive history of Fedora, host it on Wikipedia as the upstream, then package it as part of the ‘about-fedora’ package.

If you’ve never looked at how much open content there is on e.g. flickr.com and Wikicommons, please look. For content authors, this is going from practically zero useful open media available to tens of millions of photographs, diagrams, and so forth that we can not only freely reuse, but we can contribute back to.

The formal content work of the Fedora Docs Team flows back and forth with the wiki. It wouldn’t be possible to relicense just the DocBook-based guides, such as the Release Notes, Installation Guide, or Security Guide. These all have content that may or did come from the wiki. There is an interdependency that cannot be easily unwound, nor is there a reason to, as long as both the wiki and the guides are using compatible licensing.

To be honest, this change is probably a bit overdue. Most of the time, though, you can’t push the river, it has to flow as fast as it can in the direction it wants.

Agreed that this change is probably overdue. I think Fedora and Red Hat have been chasing each other’s licensing tails in an ineffective manner for some time, without looking at the broader community perspective. And perhaps to some extent that broader perspective — or at least consensus — on content didn’t really exist to the extent it does in 2009. It certainly didn’t in 2003 or 2005.

I like your analogy of moving off the archipelago and onto the great continent. We make such a point of doing so in our code work that it only makes sense to carry the same principles into our other content areas. Note that the Design team has done this for quite some time — and interestingly, if we *didn’t* change, it would be well-nigh impossible, or at least very daunting, to use CC BY-SA art in our publications!

One small niggle: I think casting the relicensing (“sublicensing” is a really weird term, honestly) clause as a nuclear option may be a bit inflammatory. But the point remains that we’ve all agreed to the CLA with the understanding that we want our contributions to Fedora to remain free, now and always. Moving to a CC license adheres directly to that intention; it also clears the way for us to be *freer*, and share more readily with others, which is also a stated goal of Fedora — not just to build great things, but to ensure they are not sequestered from others who can make use of them.

Glad to see this happening. The move to OPL was always a weird one to me but as Paul says, there really wasn’t a consensus at the time we made the last licensing move. I think today, though, the picture is different and CC really is _the_ way to go for content licensing and I’m really happy that this has been pushed through.

And although it is impractical to get everyone’s agreement (hence why the clause of the CLA is even there), maybe there’s a way to get a quick consensus just to show that the body of contributors as a whole is mostly in agreement? Maybe throw together a quick “election” and then when we flip the switch, we can also say that a body of our contributors also approved, even though we didn’t have to get that approval? Or maybe that’s just making things worse. Dunno.

We have definitely built consensus, amongst the wiki team, the Docs Team, and anyone who reads fedora-advisory-board.

My concern about going in the direction of “get permission from everyone” is that we either have to do the whole thing to be successful. For example, should I email every single Fedora list to make sure everyone hears about the change? If I start with just a few lists, aren’t the others left out?

This is a case where consensus rules actually work better. We make lots of noise that this is in the works, we give people venues to discuss it, we tweak plans in whatever way is necessary to keep consensus, and we go ahead on schedule.

Maybe I’m wrong. I know Wikipedia threw together a vote of some kind. It is certainly feasible to setup a two-week vote for anyone with a signed CLA.

But what happens if the majority says “NO”?

This is a case where, for the present and future good of the project, we need to do what is right. This is where the meritocracy comes in. The people who think and understand these issues pretty thoroughly are also in the position to advise and decide. And we all did.

we could organize a poll (the question could be something like: “Would you agree to re-license Fedora content?”) with anyone having signed the CLA. Hence, if the majority answers “No” (which I hardly believe), you can still pass through with the “nuclear weapon”.

I’m very happy to see Fedora make this transition. OPL is “dead” and does not have the legal strength that CC does. The purpose of the licensing is to allow free re-use of the content, so it’s hard to imagine any contributors being against this change since that was also the intention of the OPL…